ABSTRACT
The exceptional qualities of the Maya milpa forest garden cycle disclose not only the success of an indigenous annual cropping strategy but also the well-developed management of successive perennials in a system linked to sacred beliefs. The integration of the milpa cycle into neotropical woodland ecology transformed the succession of plants and turned the Maya forest into a garden where more than 90 percent of the dominant tree species have benefits for humans. Any understanding of the historical ecology of the Maya forest is likely to be biased and inaccurate, unless it begins with a clear vision of how human activity has affected the landscape. Restoration agriculture, as defined by Shepard (2013), describes the high-performance Maya milpa. The chapter gains some insight to the interdependence of Maya milpa agriculture and the tropical forest by examining a recent ethnographic example of the Lakantun from Chiapas.
